Rate limits (FREE SELF)

NOTE: For GitLab.com, please see GitLab.com-specific rate limits.

Rate limiting is a common technique used to improve the security and durability of a web application.

For example, a simple script can make thousands of web requests per second. The requests could be:

• Malicious.
• Apathetic.
• Just a bug.

Your application and infrastructure may not be able to cope with the load. For more details, see Denial-of-service attack. Most cases can be mitigated by limiting the rate of requests from a single IP address.

Most brute-force attacks are similarly mitigated by a rate limit.

Configurable limits

You can set these rate limits in the Admin Area of your instance:

• Import/Export rate limits
• Issues rate limits
• Notes rate limits
• Protected paths
• Raw endpoints rate limits
• User and IP rate limits
• Package registry rate limits
• Git LFS rate limits
• Files API rate limits
• Deprecated API rate limits

You can set these rate limits using the Rails console:

• Webhook rate limit

Failed authentication ban for Git and container registry

GitLab returns HTTP status code 403 for 1 hour, if 30 failed authentication requests were received in a 3-minute period from a single IP address. This applies only to combined:

• Git requests.
• Container registry (/jwt/auth) requests.

This limit:

• Is reset by requests that authenticate successfully. For example, 29 failed authentication requests followed by 1 successful request, followed by 29 more failed authentication requests would not trigger a ban.
• Does not apply to JWT requests authenticated by gitlab-ci-token.
• Is disabled by default.

No response headers are provided.

For configuration information, see Omnibus GitLab configuration options.

Non-configurable limits

Repository archives

Introduced in GitLab 12.9.

A rate limit for downloading repository archives is available. The limit applies to the project and to the user initiating the download either through the UI or the API.

The rate limit is 5 requests per minute per user.

Webhook Testing

Introduced in GitLab 13.4.

There is a rate limit for testing webhooks, which prevents abuse of the webhook functionality.

The rate limit is 5 requests per minute per user.

Troubleshooting

Rack Attack is denylisting the load balancer

Rack Attack may block your load balancer if all traffic appears to come from the load balancer. In that case, you must:

1. Configure nginx[real_ip_trusted_addresses]. This keeps users' IPs from being listed as the load balancer IPs.

2. Allowlist the load balancer's IP addresses.

3. Reconfigure GitLab:

   sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure

Remove blocked IPs from Rack Attack with Redis

To remove a blocked IP:

1. Find the IPs that have been blocked in the production log:

   grep "Rack_Attack" /var/log/gitlab/gitlab-rails/auth.log

2. Since the denylist is stored in Redis, you must open up redis-cli:

   /opt/gitlab/embedded/bin/redis-cli -s /var/opt/gitlab/redis/redis.socket

3. You can remove the block using the following syntax, replacing <ip> with the actual IP that is denylisted:

   del cache:gitlab:rack::attack:allow2ban:ban:<ip>

4. Confirm that the key with the IP no longer shows up:

   keys *rack::attack*

By default, the keys command is disabled.

1. Optionally, add the IP to the allowlist to prevent it being denylisted again.